When Mike Stavlund’s four-month-old son suddenly died, a flood of cards, flowers, meals, phone calls, and gifts let his family know that they were loved and cared for. Less welcome were the books, in particular the religious books. Often impossibly upbeat, saccharine sweet, and with all kinds of confident promises, they were too painful to read and too offensive to bear.
Instead Mike wrote this book, one week at a time during that first terrible year. A Force of Will explores the stark reality of loss, the alienation from all of life, the feeling of suffocation at the hands of the well-meaning people gathered around, and the sense of being abandoned by God.
The book is available from your favourite Christian retailer, visit the Christian Bookshop Directory to find your local shop. You can also order online here, and the ebook is available from your ebook retailer.
Palliative Faith
The intricate surgery that my son experienced at three days of life was called palliative—a repair designed to work well enough, and for long enough, to get the patient to the next point in his or her treatment. Palliative repairs are those that come in a series—one repair builds on the one before it and aims to enable the surgery that will follow. Which seems unsatisfying. One might wonder why the surgeons can’t just get everything right the first time—until, that is, one recalls the rate of growth in a newborn. Simple things like stitches and scars would heal and grow with the body’s structures, of course, but the more necessary artificial implements would not be so simple. If the surgeons attached a Gore-Tex shunt to Will’s walnut-sized heart, for example, they would install an intentionally oversized piece that wouldn’t actually work well until he grew to a size proportional to the repair. Then, for a matter of days or weeks, the repair would work at optimal efficiency, in fact encouraging the very growth that would make it less effective later on, until it was finally so inefficient that it would need to be replaced.
Though many might disagree, I think our faith is palliative, too. Faith needs to work well enough to get us further along, and we are allowed to make adjustments as we go along the journey of life.
The faith that worked for me when I was seven, nestled into an upholstered easy chair with an illustrated Living Bible on a Sunday afternoon, was palliative. I sat there, reflecting on what I’d heard in Sunday school that day, and decided I should ask Jesus to come into my heart so that I wouldn’t have to be afraid of death. It was a beautiful moment, and one that I treasure. But I’m glad my faith has changed since then.
There was the faith that carried me through my teenage years—a deterministic understanding that if something happened, God must have willed it. I struggled during those years to understand how the world worked, entertaining long internal debates about whether I should pray for success on my many fishing trips, or whether it was fair for me to thank God for my avoidance of an auto accident when that seemed unkind to the person who was actually in the wrecked car. Looking back, I think I was developing a faith that God embraced, and accepted at face value, even as I struggled toward greater engagement with God and life and the realities all around me, and as I began to develop a view of the world that didn’t put me at the very center. This faith was palliative, preparing me for the growth to come.
There was a faith that sustained me in college as I took nightly walks during cold Chicago winters to beg God for a girlfriend who would become a wife. Staring up at the stars, I offered my confident assertions that I would be a great husband, arguing that reason and justice required I be given a wife. This faith was shaped when the answers to my prayers came and I found myself as a new husband to a beautiful and wonder- ful wife, yet with a fresh and painful awareness of my own brokenness and inability to love her as I had imagined I would.
This growing faith was tweaked and challenged through several years as a pastor, tested as we joined with some friends to start a church on which we eventually performed a kind of organizational euthanasia and were left feeling orphaned and alone, bereft of community. This faith was stretched during a ten-year journey through infertility, moving uncertainly up the ladder of increasingly invasive treatments, until we felt the mixture of absolute joy and panic that comes with the news that you’re pregnant . . . with twins!
It was faith that pulled us through the harrowing experience of trying to thwart a miscarriage, of sitting in the worrisome place of a six-month stretch of bed rest. It was faith that sat with us in the silence of those initial ultrasounds when the room was just very, very quiet and the doctors and technicians were visibly nervous, shuttling into and out of the room with forced smiles. It was faith that gave us hope as we plunged headlong into the world of intensive care and surgery and life support and constant monitoring. And today, it is faith that tries to make sense of a life that is all at once painfully absent the life of a precious firstborn son, but also full of the life of his engaging and completely healthy twin sister.
Our faith ought not to be a faith that chooses belief over practice, and it shouldn’t be selfish or self-interested; it ought to be a faith that works for us, yes, but one that benefits those around us even more than ourselves, and that leads us to the ultimate end to which we’re called—a greater capacity to love. If it looks inward, it ought to do so such that it can give outward in ever increasing measure.
Coffee Maker
A couple of days before the funeral, I was sitting at the kitchen table, keyboard clattering away as I tried to write myself to clarity about some imponderable idea, tried to come to some acceptance of some unavoidable reality, tried to anesthetize myself against some overwhelming pain.
My dear father-in-law walked in with a smile on his face and a package under his arm. He and my mother-in-law had just returned from Target, she with some adorable clothes for her granddaughter, and he with a state-of-the-art coffee maker, which he promptly displayed to me. I was startled by this act of generosity, and grateful as always for a new toy. And yet I was shocked as I heard my mouth form these words: “Thanks, Dad. That’s perfect. And when you go back home after the funeral, you can just take it with you.”
Owing to his generous spirit, he wasn’t offended by my apparent ungratefulness, but hesitated for just a second before he went on with his day. Still, the next day I forced myself to apologize for my rudeness, though I was at a loss to explain it. “I have no idea why I said that! I’m so sorry. We’ll be happy to use the coffee maker, every day.”
But the truth is, it’s still sitting in the back of a closet.
I think what I was longing for on that confusing morn- ing was to turn back the clock. I was looking for a small, containable, familiar life. I wanted to go back to using our undersized, weathered stainless-steel French press and its familiar routine of heating water, grinding beans, combining the two, stirring the slurry, filling the rest of the pot, putting the lid on, waiting three minutes, and pouring exactly two full cups of coffee—one for me, and one for my wife.
What I didn’t want—what I couldn’t handle—was a life that was any larger than that. I didn’t want any family to be around us. I didn’t want houseguests. I didn’t want to extend myself in any gesture of hospitality. I wanted to go back to my smaller life of four people—two adults, two tiny children. That smaller life that had been contained by these four walls and its withering 24-hour schedule. If that life had been full to the brim of feedings and medications and baths and tests and interventions and surgeries and home visits and terrifying uncertainty, at least it was familiar and approachable and pos- sible. At least it offered some hope at the end of the day. But this new life I was kicking back against was utterly unfamiliar, dark, and seemingly without hope. It was a life, but it was a life without Will. That old life was a mirage, if it ever really existed. It was gone from my grasp, impossible to reclaim.
I just wanted my old cup of coffee.
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